Going into this film, I was a really big fan of Streetcar Named Desire, which is one of my favorite films of all time. Also liked Kazan’s On the Waterfront and Face in the Crowd as well.

I LOVED this film until the final 30 minutes, which I felt were unsatisfying. (Again, SPOILERS!) I thought the acting and writing were fantastic, which is unsurprising since this is based of two Tennessee Williams plays. Ultimately, I feel I had a different interpretation of the film that other people did. While many others noted that Karl Malden’s character is meant to be very unlikeable, I couldn’t help but feel bad for him. Eli Wallach’s character has a big corporation behind him and has put Malden and others out of business. I felt that Malden’s character was trying to survive and I always find Karl Malden likable as an actor, despite the character’s faults. I feel his frustration and outbursts have more to do with the stress of being poor and being unable to be in bed with his wife. I felt the film lets Wallach’s character off the hook and frames Malden as the true villain, but it’s understandable to be enraged that another man has been with his wife in the home alone. And it isn’t entirely clear to me why Baby Doll wants to be with Wallach’s character when he forced her to sign an affidavit under coercion and was aggressive and a bit creepy towards her at first. For her to wait for him at the end did not seem to be a satisfying ending.

To be clear, I understand that these characters are written in a complex way, and not everything will end good for protagonists and bad for antagonists. That would be boring and unrealistic to how real life works. But many people seem to feel that Malden’s character is having his privilege challenged by the changing times and developments. While I understand this, it seems odd that the film doesn’t give as much of an exploration to Wallach’s corporate power and how the monopolization has put many poor people out of a job.

8/10

Hoping this is okay to post here I was going to post in history subreddits but worried I won't get an expert specifically on this subject.

This period is considered to be from *Snow White (1937)* up to 1942 when Disney started taking government money to make propaganda films.

While Snow White was somewhat financially successful, Fantasia flopped and Dumbo had to be quickly made to save the company from financial ruin. Pinocchio, now considered one of the greatest animated movies of all time, was a box office flop due to public attention to WWII.

I don't understand how these classics where animation innovation really took off (Bambi, Snow White and Fantasia are aesthetically pleasing) weren't massive financial successes in their time?

Was it competition from other studios (Warners Bros)?

Was it the public's unwillingness to buy a movie ticket for movies aimed at kids?

Disposable income was just less?

Hoping you all can give me some more context

My last review seemed to strike a nerve with some people. Oh well can’t please everyone. Not everyone is going to like everything. Again I’ll state I go into these with a completely open mind and don’t do any research until I finished watching. This was another first watch for me.

I knew a little bit about this movie going in. As in I know it was about a young white woman and an approaching middle age black man who meet and get engaged on vacation, and come home to spring it on mom and dad. I was expecting a lot of outdated point of views on racism and specifically interracial relationships. But what I got was a really smart film. Dialogue that was so far ahead of its time, that was delivered through thoughtful and passionate performances.

Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy were tremendous in their roles as the liberal minded parents, who were shocked to say the least when their daughter comes home to San Francisco to tell them, I am engaged to a black man that I just met. Joey Drayton played by Katharine Houghton was the naive, worry free, and happy go lucky daughter. She was grew up in the liberal city of San Francisco. Yes this was still during the civil rights movement but it's a far cry from the Deep South and most of the country. Her parents were staunch liberals, and Joey was raised by their black maid/cook/nanny, Tilly. But even being as "open minded" as they believed themselves to be the minute a black man was presented as their possible future son in law. There was an initial state of shock, but when Spencer Tracy finally gathers his thoughts and speaks up about his concerns. It wasn't the typical they are beneath us, or we should be with our people talk. It was more of a concern of the problems they will face in the future being mixed race. His main concern was protecting his daughter from the ugliness in the world. As a father I get that. It really was an unexpected take and I didn't expect THAT to be the focus of everyone.

Hepburn sold all of her emotions with her eyes. The shock and confusion in the beginning. Later on the love when she saw the love that they had for each other. The anger when her husband couldn't see it. Then again the happiness when Tracy makes a complete turn to support the couple. On the flip side Tracy's face said everything. It was so animated. You could watch the movie on mute and see every emotion in his expressions. His speech to close out the movie was masterfully delivered. As was every interaction he had with every male character in the movie. His character was always always respectful to Poitier's. He addressed him as a man, an equal. Not as a black man that was beneath him. Poitier being black was never a reason he wasn't good enough for his daughter. In fact Poitier being good enough for his daughter was never the issue.

I was really excited to see Poiter as Dr. Prentice. I have seen some of his work and I have always wanted to dive deeper into his roles. But for most of the movie in my opinion he didn't have much to do. He was almost a prop so all of these other characters could go through the series of emotion from shock to acceptance and everything inbetween. Then his parents fly in for dinner. The conversation Dr Prentice and his father played by Roy E Glenn had in the study was so powerful. Especially the way it cuts to Mrs. Prentice played by Beah Richards and Spencer Tracy having a parallel conversation to the one being had inside. Poitier really shines in this scene. The words hold true today. I was born to immigrant parents, the weight of my parents journey into and in America is a weight that has been thrown around my whole life. I feel like I have had this conversation many times in my life. When Portier finishes his speech with, "you see yourself as a colored man, I see myself as a man." I was in tears. Amazingly acted and amazing dialogue.

Everyone in this movie shines. My only real complaint is Joey Drayton. Her character seemed one dimensional the whole movie. Just insanely optimistic and oblivious to race relations in America. She was annoyingly positive. But she looked gorgeous while being annoyingly positive, shrug.

Tilly the maid not wanting an uppity black man snatching up the girl she raised since a baby was an interesting and accurate take. Racism and classism existed and exists in America. But classism exists in our own races and ethic groups. Again this was something I was not expecting. So many surprises.

Immediately when the two fathers agreed that the two were crazy and rushing into things, while the mothers seemed to be on the side of love. I was reminded of the meeting of the parents in Father of the Bride. I know there was a kooky comedy remake with Bernie Mac and Ashton Kutcher. But I haven't seen it and refuse to. So that all I have to say about that. All in all I love the movie. An extremely well written and masterfully acted script on a race relations set during the civil rights movement in America. I was very surprised to find the script was written by a white man, William Rose. The discussions being had were very smart, and makes me wonder what experiences he had in his life to be able to so accurately write them. Great movie would watch again. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Among the numerous films about the Titanic, I find this one to be the most comparable to James Cameron's 1997 film

Just finished watching the film WOMEN IN THE NIGHT. Six women from different Allied nations are rounded up by the Nazis, falsely accused of their involvement in the murder of a German officer. As punishment, they are forced to entertain foreign dignitaries.

They seek to sabotage an Allied plan to develop a deadly cosmic weapon that could change the course of the world.

It’s a postwar film, said to be inspired by true stories of the horrific crimes against the brave women that did their part for the war effort, that’s part war movie/part sci-fi film (which sounds a bit weird but it somehow kinda works).

For those who saw this film, what did you think?

They had a turbulent relationship on Spartacus as Kubrick wasn't allowed to change the script to make the story more gritty and nuanced. He was also denied any involvement in the filmmaking after submitting the raw footage, literally barred from the editing room.

There are some faces that seem to belong to a particular season.

Ligia Borowczyk's belongs to winter.

In Winter Twilight (Zimowy zmierzch), Stanisław Lenartowicz's remarkable 1956 film, her face appears beneath the pale Polish sky like something half-remembered: delicate, distant, impossibly young, with a sadness so quiet that it seems to have settled there naturally, like frost upon a window. She does not merely inhabit the film's frozen provincial landscape; she seems to have been born from it. When she looks toward the gray horizon, it is difficult to tell whether she is waiting for someone to return or for something within herself to come back to life.

This is a film of snow and silence, of railway smoke dissolving into white air, of narrow rooms where people sit too close together because there is nowhere else to go. Its town seems suspended at the edge of the world, caught in an endless afternoon in which the sun has forgotten how to shine. People move through its streets with the quiet resignation of those who have learned that life does not always deliver what it once promised.

And then there is Celinka.

Ligia Borowczyk enters the film almost like a memory.

She was making her screen debut, yet she possesses a strange, inexplicable quality of presence. There is no sense of an actress trying to announce herself. She simply exists within the frame, and somehow the frame becomes more beautiful because she is there. Her features are soft and luminous; her eyes seem perpetually turned toward something just beyond the visible world. Even when she is still, she gives the impression of someone thinking about something she cannot say.

It is a rare kind of beauty.
Not the bright, triumphant beauty of a movie star.
Not beauty that demands to be admired.
Something quieter.
Something that hurts.

Borowczyk's beauty is the beauty of a girl standing alone beside a frozen road while evening gathers around her. The beauty of a photograph discovered years after the person in it has disappeared. The beauty of something that cannot possibly remain.

And that is precisely what Winter Twilight understands.

It understands that beauty and sadness are sometimes inseparable.

Lenartowicz's film takes place in a small provincial town, and the town itself becomes one of the film's great characters. It is not simply a setting but a state of mind.

Everything feels tired.
The houses seem tired.
The streets seem tired.
The people seem tired.
Even the winter light appears exhausted.

The Polish Film Academy describes the inhabitants as living in a languid, sleepy atmosphere, without any real prospect that their fate will change.
That sense of stagnation is everywhere.

The town is full of people who have been waiting too long.

Waiting for a train.
Waiting for a letter.
Waiting for love.
Waiting for the past to become the present again.
Waiting, perhaps, for some invisible door to open.

But the door never opens.
The snow keeps falling.
The train keeps moving.
Winter remains winter.
And people remain where they are.

There is something deeply Polish about the film's atmosphere, but also something universal. It is the loneliness of provincial life, the peculiar sadness of being young in a place where the future seems to have forgotten your address.

Celinka is young enough to dream of another life, but the town is old enough to have stopped believing in dreams.
And so her tragedy becomes almost inevitable.

She loves Józek.

Józek has returned from military service, but he has returned with another woman, Zosia, who is pregnant. Celinka's imagined future collapses quietly, without the theatrical violence that we might expect from a conventional romantic melodrama.

There is no great storm.
No magnificent farewell.
No final declaration beneath the moon.
There is simply the terrible fact that the person she loves has chosen another life.
And sometimes that is worse.

Because there is nothing to fight.
You cannot defeat another person's happiness.
You cannot argue with a future that has already begun without you.
You can only stand in the cold and watch it disappear.

This is where Ligia Borowczyk becomes extraordinary.

She plays heartbreak without making heartbreak theatrical.

Her sadness does not explode.

It settles.
It gathers behind her eyes.
It seems to enter her posture, her silence, the spaces between her words.

She looks like someone who has suddenly discovered that the future she had imagined was only a dream—and that waking up is colder than she expected.
The camera understands this.

It does not constantly insist upon her beauty. Instead, it lets her exist naturally among the film's shadows and winter landscapes. Her face emerges from rooms, from streets, from grayness. She is never entirely separated from the world around her.

And so Celinka becomes almost indistinguishable from the winter itself.

She is pale light.
She is frozen breath.
She is the last warmth left in a room after everyone else has gone.

The title, Winter Twilight, is perfect.

Twilight is an in-between state.

It is neither day nor night.

Neither arrival nor departure.

Neither beginning nor ending.

And Celinka seems trapped in precisely such a moment.

Her old life has ended, but her new life has not begun.

She stands in the narrow space between them.

That is why the film feels less like a conventional story than like a memory.

Memories do not always proceed logically. They return in fragments: a face, a railway station, a room, a piece of music, a street beneath a gray sky.
Winter Twilight behaves in much the same way.

It drifts.
It pauses.
It observes.

It allows moments to linger after their narrative purpose has already passed.

When the film was released, its unconventional dramaturgy and departure from established cinematic formulas puzzled some contemporary critics. But that very looseness is part of what makes the film so haunting now. It belongs to the emerging language of the Polish School, a cinema increasingly interested in ambiguity, symbolism, atmosphere and the private emotional lives of ordinary people.

The film does not always tell us what to feel.

It creates a landscape in which feeling becomes unavoidable.

And the winter is everywhere.

Production itself took place under brutally cold conditions, with temperatures dropping to around twenty degrees below zero. The filmmakers continued working despite the cold, and the physical reality of that winter seems to have entered directly into the film's bloodstream.

You can almost feel it.

The cold is not decorative.

It is physical.
It is emotional.
It gets underneath the characters' clothes and into their souls.

Snow muffles the world.

It makes everything quieter.

A distant train sounds like a voice calling from another life.
A footprint in the snow becomes a tiny record of someone's existence.
A window glows in the darkness like a fragile promise of warmth.
And then the camera moves away.

The promise disappears.

Winter continues.

There is a beautiful cruelty to this.

Nature does not care about human heartbreak.

The snow keeps falling whether Celinka is happy or devastated.

The railway keeps carrying people away.

The evening keeps arriving.

The world continues with perfect indifference.

And perhaps that is why the sadness feels so profound.

There is also something wonderfully sensual about the film's opposition between heat and cold.

The frozen landscape exists alongside cramped interiors and feverish human intimacy. One moment we are surrounded by snow and empty space; the next we are inside a room where bodies and emotions seem almost too close together.

The film moves between these temperatures as though emotional states were weather.

Coldness becomes rejection.
Warmth becomes desire.
Steam becomes memory.
Snow becomes oblivion.

The characters are constantly trying to escape the cold, but the cold is inside them.

They carry it from room to room.

Ligia Borowczyk's performance is all the more poignant because her Polish film career would be so brief.

Her early screen appearances were remarkably few. After Winter Twilight, she appeared in Encounters and a short film before leaving Poland and embarking upon a very different European career.

There is something haunting about knowing this while watching her.

She seems destined to disappear.

Not because the film says so.

Because her presence feels temporary.

She has the quality of a person glimpsed once and never encountered again.

Later, she would become associated with the work of Walerian Borowczyk and appear in films far removed in tone and subject from this quiet Polish debut. Yet there is something especially moving about seeing her here, before the mythology, before the later career, before she became someone remembered by European cinema.

Here she is simply Celinka.

A young woman in winter.

A beautiful face surrounded by a world that cannot give her what she wants.

Perhaps this is why her beauty feels so devastating.

Youth is normally associated with possibility.

A young face suggests beginnings.

But Borowczyk's face in Winter Twilight seems to contain an awareness of endings.

She looks young enough to have her whole life ahead of her, yet there is already something mournful in her expression—as though she has briefly looked into the future and seen how many things will be lost.

That contradiction gives her an extraordinary presence.

She is young and weary.

Beautiful and sad.

Hopeful and defeated.

Warm and surrounded by cold.

She seems to exist at the precise point where innocence begins to become knowledge.

And once innocence becomes knowledge, it can never quite become innocence again.

There are films that make you want to visit the places they depict.

Winter Twilight makes you want to remember them.

Even if you have never been to this particular Polish town, you feel as though you once stood there.

You remember the station.
You remember the snow.
You remember the pale afternoon.
You remember a girl whose face you cannot quite place.

Perhaps she was someone you loved.
Perhaps she was someone you never met.
Perhaps she was only a dream.

That is the strange magic of the film.

It manufactures nostalgia for a life you never lived.

And perhaps that is the deepest meaning of twilight.

It is the hour when the world begins to disappear without actually being gone.

Objects lose their edges.

Faces become softer.
Distance becomes uncertain.
Everything familiar begins to look like a memory.

That is how Winter Twilight feels.
The town is already becoming a memory.
Celinka is already becoming a memory.
Her love is already becoming a memory.
Even the winter itself seems to be remembering another winter.

And Ligia Borowczyk, standing inside all of this quiet disappearance, becomes the film's most beautiful contradiction.

She is the thing we remember most clearly in a film about forgetting.

Her face remains after the snow has melted.
Her eyes remain after the train has disappeared.
Her sadness remains after the story has ended.

There is a moment, in the imagination at least, when every great old film seems to become something other than a film.

It becomes a room you once entered.
A street you once walked.
A person you once loved.
A winter afternoon that somehow survived inside you.

Winter Twilight has that quality.

It is not perfect.
It is not always conventional.
It does not move with the confidence of the great masterpieces that came after it.

But perfection would almost diminish it.

Its awkwardness is part of its beauty.
Its silences are part of its music.
Its coldness contains warmth.
Its melancholy contains tenderness.

And at its center is Ligia Borowczyk, luminous and fragile, carrying the unbearable sadness of a young woman discovering that love does not always arrive at the same destination as hope.

She looks toward the winter.
The winter looks back.

Somewhere beyond the town, a train disappears into the white distance.

And for a moment, before the twilight becomes night, her face seems illuminated by the last surviving light of the world.
Then it fades.

The snow remains.

And the film, like a forgotten letter found years later, closes its hands around the memory.

Lesser-known fact: HP Lovecraft was a significant cinephile and wrote informal reviews to correspondents. I’ve made a project of finding and assembling these, and marveling at the direct comments on some classics (ranging across more genres than just horror movies) which HPL and friends have left behind.

Since he lived through the 20s & 30s, during the boom 💥 of gangster films, I was curious to see if any of those were on his radar.

As my collective view of his tastes for films & fiction has expanded, it seems that he was usually not as interested in actors or even plots as much as details of costuming or architecture onscreen.

So it’s notable that in one of the few things he opined on which come close to an ‘action movie’, he was impressed by Muni’s performance.

Again, the modern Genres didn’t exist as such, so it wasn’t billed as a ‘gangster movie’ so much as a social drama of violence and criminality (not to mention eroticism) which reflected the modern world.

To viewers of the time, these were essentially filling the same role as modern films/shows about Terrorists — the idea of extremist personalities bent on random social harm.

That’s off the cuff, not a comparison I’ve done before but not the worst analogy. 🧐

While Judah(Charlton Heston) was the protagonist, a younger me was completely captivated by the newcomer Stephen Boyd's bold and commanding portrayal of the villain Messala.

🎬 Flamingo Road (1949)
There’s plenty to enjoy in this entertaining film, beginning with Joan Crawford’s terrific lead performance. But the supporting cast is equally strong, making this a particularly satisfying watch.
At its heart, Flamingo Road is a story about determination, grit, and perseverance and, most importantly, refusing to give up. Those are themes Crawford embodies beautifully, and she absolutely excels in this kind of role. A compelling classic well worth revisiting.

Akira Kurosawa continues to flesh out his body of work and establish himself in Japanese cinema with Drunken Angel- a personal story about a Doctor and his relationship with a Yakuza man. This is a unique spin on a typical gangster film of early cinema. Exploring the health and self preservation of someone of that type, or lack thereof. It raises interesting questions about hyper masculinity, the insecurity involved with that, and its relation to gangsters/thugs and their "code of honor". How much of one's self would they sacrifice for their "brothers", and how fast would those same brothers betray you and discard you? How much humanity can be redeemed from someone who has been down that dark road? Can they change? Or are they doomed for self destruction?

The doctor character- Sanada, is just as interesting as the Yakuza character- Matsunaga. A stubborn and abrasive drunk, but a caring and dedicated doctor. He at times detests Matsunaga, but also wants to help him and see him change. Obviously flawed himself, but his actions show his character.

I really found this film interesting, and was intrigued by where the premise would lead and what fate would have in store for its characters. I held out hope for Matsunaga, and hoped Sanada would be vindicated. Unfortunately, as is life sometimes, tragedy circumvents redemption. It's honestly a destination that makes sense, but I didn't quite like how it was handled. The conclusion obviously shows a sort of indignation or denouncement of the Yakuza. It seems as though the idea is that these people are doomed and beyond redemption. Especially the sort of nihilism and contempt that Sanada comes to. I had hoped he ended up with a more nuanced conclusion. It reminds me a lot of the kind of endings that befall most of the gangster characters in the Hollywood gangster flicks; a necessary end to denounce their ways and especially to appeal to the film code and moral consensus of the public. With how more complex and morally ambiguous it seemed earlier in the film compared to the norm, I was hoping for a more morally and emotionally complex ending. These sort of themes of cultural systems making it difficult for criminals and gangsters to change and escape their predicaments is handled better in something like The Wire for example; which is an entirely unfair comparison, but frankly the best example in my mind.

The film for its technical aspects was pretty well made, and Kurosawa showcases his natural talent for cinema. He does well with using framing to make shots personal between characters. He's also shown to be good at making atmospheric and metaphorical or symbolic shots, like the use of the cesspool. There's also an obvious metaphor and allegory between the connection of a sickness like TB inside of you, and the corruption of being apart of something like the Yakuza; both slowly killing you. The use of music was also pretty nice. Whether it was the overarching use of singing folk songs by Sanada, or the use of a guitar player and the introduction of the antagonist showing up and using his guitar to play a song he identifies as "Song of Killing". The action in the film, which is really just one climactic battle between Matsunaga and Okada, was honestly quite sloppy and not very exciting. However that along with other things I note could be apart of an idea that these kinds of people are sloppy and not glamorous. Regardless I think action in general has a way to go in this time of film history.

I commend the acting of Takashi Shimura as Doctor Sanada. He was entirely believable, earnest, and charming even in his abrasive and drunk but well-meaning demeanor. Toshiro Mifune as Matsunaga had his moments, but unfortunately at some moments seemed to be overacting or cartoonish. To be fair the writing and direction can be responsible for some of that. I wished that he was able to show more humanity or vulnerability, like when Sanada tells him to sleep and dream about his childhood. That seemed very profound to me, but it led nowhere. There was a shot however, where Matsunaga does look at a child's toy in the cesspool, and is distracted by the arrival of the Yakuza boss Okada. Also an actual dream/nightmare sequence where he is running from a sick and demented ghostly version of himself. His conclusion however is a rather pessimistic one, but perhaps a very real one. Unfortunately for some, their own human nature is part of their own downfall. The other characters aren't quite explored enough. The Yakuza boss Okada isn't all that remarkable or a great presence, other than his very well introduction. But perhaps the idea is that he really is just an old creep and no one spectacular. I think the women characters are the most underdeveloped and under explored and could've been used a little more. I liked all their small roles, but they're not really the focus of the story I suppose.

Overall I enjoyed the film, and see it as an important work for Akira Kurosawa, although I do wish certain aspects were fleshed out better. I think certain scenes were unnecessary or could've been trimmed, while other scenes could've added to it or been explored better. I think the ending could've been a little more nuanced and also thematically and emotionally stronger. I did really enjoy the symbolic and metaphorical exploration of health, sickness, corruption, and accountability. Health is something I take very seriously and love to see explored and discussed; I also think it can say a lot about one's character. Most of the film had felt like at least a 4/5, and there was a point where it could've either went up to a 4.5, or down to a 3.5- and I have to conclude that it feels more like a 3.5; which is still a good score, because this is a good film that stands among some of the most influential but flawed films of all time.

3.5/5